


For a Minute There, I Lost Myself

by st_aurafina



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Bear Has the Best Bedside Manner, Fever Dreams, Happy Ending, John Lives, M/M, Nightmares, Shaw is a Lousy Doctor, Simmons Doesn't Though, Talking To Dead People, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22675498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/pseuds/st_aurafina
Summary: After the cyber apocalypse, Fusco wakes up in a hospital bed and knows John didn't make it.
Relationships: Lionel Fusco/John Reese
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	For a Minute There, I Lost Myself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThisPolarNoise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisPolarNoise/gifts).



> Thank you to my beta.
> 
> Title from "Karma Police" by Radiohead.

Fusco and John don't have much time to figure out what they are to each other before the cyber apocalypse goes down. A few frenzied kisses, a little bit more. Couple of nights at Fusco's place, a couple at Johns's. One half-ironic "Yeah, I love you too," before they split for their respective final battles. 

Samaritan's guy is fast with his knife. He's so fast that Fusco, who counts shots on TV shows by habit, loses track of the number of times it dives into his belly.

He remembers stumbling into the hospital, remembers lifting the bundled jacket he has pressed to his gut and the blood gushing down his shirt. He remembers being really cold. He remembers feeling embarrassed about the bloody palm print he leaves on the admissions desk as his knees fold under him. He doesn't remember hitting the floor. 

There's a whole lot of voices. He reaches up to his head and touches one of those paper hats you wear in surgery. Someone holds his hand; he doesn't know who. He wakes up dizzy and uncoordinated with a throat made of gravel, and someone slips a straw between his lips. 

"You're doing great, Dad," Lee says. "Hang in there." Fusco blinks at him and tries to rally some words. If he's about to kick it, he'd better have something profound to tell his kid. 

"Don't be a cop," he says. He should probably tell him not to marry one, either. Cops are lousy husbands; he should know.

"Well, I'm aiming for pro hockey, but I'll take it on board," says Lee. He offers him the straw again. "And I've been on, like, two dates. I'm not really ready for thoughts about marriage." 

Damn, thinks Fusco. The drugs must be making him chatty. Don't say anything embarrassing, he wills himself. 

"There's a box of condoms in the hall closet if you ever need them," he hears himself say.

Lee pats his arm. "Thanks, Dad. I'm so glad to be scarred for life." 

Fusco wonders when his kid turned into this brave, lippy smart-ass, then he falls asleep. 

He wakes up to cool lips on his forehead, and opens his eyes to see John leaning over him. The room is dark, and John is hung with shadows, but seeing him pushes all the pain and terror far away. Stupid mook, making him wait all that time to know if he came through okay.

"Hey," Fusco rasps into the darkness. "Glad you made it." Then Simmons steps out from behind John, gun drawn and a wide grin splitting his face. Fusco realises that this is a dream and John didn't make it after all.

He still tries to sit up, to warn John even though he's already dead. It hurts like getting stabbed all over again, and the pain makes him slow. Simmons raises a gun in his dead hand, fires a bullet into John's dead skull, and there's blood everywhere. 

Everything is a little hazy after that. Fusco remembers Shaw poking a threatening finger into a doctor's chest, shouting about infection. In the eternal greyness, he wakes with a heavy weight over his legs, and flashes back to the subway, trapped under piles of rock and bent girders. A warm, slimy something strops his fingers and he shrieks.

Bear gives him a warning yip and scrambles up to the other end of the hospital bed. 

"Calm the fuck down, Lionel!" Shaw leans over him, shines a penlight into his eyes and does something to his IV. Warmth creeps up his forearm and into his brain. He drifts off into sleep before he can ask about John.

Simmons is sitting in the armchair by the corner, shuffling a deck of cards. "You know your problem, Lionel?" he says, flicking card after card into the shadows. 

"Pretty sure you're gonna tell me." Fusco's voice is surly, even though he knows he's talking to a corpse. 

"You're a fucking coward," Simmons says. A card goes whistling towards him. When Fusco looks down, it's embedded in his forearm. It's starting to sting. 

Simmons spreads his fingers and the cards fly out like shrapnel. Fusco could probably dodge but what's the point? He closes his eyes, waits for them to strike. 

There's a horrible crunch, a breaking-bone kind of crunch. When he opens his eyes, Simmons' head is on backwards, hilariously gawping at the wall behind him. 

"You give up too easily," says John, looming over the bed. The cards, all red and shiny, slither away off the bedclothes as John leans down to kiss him. It's a deep kiss, a real dirty kiss, the kind John only delivers in darkened rooms where nobody can see. Back when he was alive, at least. Maybe death helped him deal with some of his issues, Fusco thinks, slightly hysterical. 

"We shoulda done this properly," Fusco says, between kisses. John is improbably in the bed with him now, one leg crooked up over Fusco's thighs. "Before it was all over." 

"Who says it's over?" John's hand is on Fusco's cock, which works just fine despite the blood loss. "Don't be a quitter, Lionel." 

Fusco laughs, because that is actually hilarious given that it's John who died. Then he gasps, and thrusts into John's fist under the covers. It's ridiculous, but at this point, Fusco's earned some pleasure, even if it's imaginary. He comes with John's mouth on his, falls asleep in his arms. "I'll miss you," he says, as the world fades out on him. 

Dream John kisses him again. "Quitter," he says. 

When Fusco wakes up, he knows that was definitely a dream. John would never kiss anyone whose mouth tastes this bad. 

He peels his tongue away from the roof of his mouth and manages to say, "Ack."

Shaw appears at his side. She pushes a couple of ice-chips into his mouth. "Suck those," she says. "You're through the worst of it. Probably." 

Fusco lets the ice melt, feels the coolness trickle down the back of his throat, gently probes the wound in his belly, and considers what his life is now that John is dead. He has to be okay with it – he's got a kid to raise, a career to rebuild – but he honestly can't imagine not having John in his life anymore. His exploratory finger sets off a twinge of pain scary deep in his gut and it seems representational. A soft noise escapes his mouth, a pathetic little whine-sob. 

Shaw slaps his hand away from the bandages, and startled, he gives her what he hopes is a look of death. 

She laughs, and cheerfully flips him the bird. "Come on, Fusco, you got off lightly," she says. "I really hope John pulls through. I can't wait to tell him he's gonna be in rehab basically forever." 

Fusco jolts upright, then yelps when stitches pull inside him. "What?" he says. "Wait, say that again?" He doesn't understand. John has to be dead: that's what his brain has been trying to tell him all this time, right? 

"We have to do this all over again? Really?" Shaw says. "Okay, Fusco, for the fiftieth time: Harold's flown the coop, don't know where he is, but the Machine says he's alive. John is down in ICU, but he's stable for now. Might make it? Might not. The longer he holds out, the better his chances." 

"You told me this already?" Fusco tries to sort the facts out in his head. John is alive? His head spins, and he's suddenly gasping for air. His chest aches and aches, drowning out the dull throb in his guts. Beside the bed, the machine they have him hooked up to starts screaming an alarm. 

"Jesus," says Shaw. "Now we're in trouble." 

A nurse appears in the doorway, her face red with anger. She bears down on Shaw. "First you attack a doctor, then you bring that germ machine of a dog into my ward and now this. You agitate my patient, you get the hell out!" She points a finger down the corridor. 

Shaw crosses her arms. "Try and make me go. Please." Fusco hears her knuckles crack. He doesn't have time for this. Not when John is alive. 

"Shaw," he says. "I need to see him." 

"No," say the nurse. "You're staying put, mister." 

Fusco rallies his calmest and most implacable expression. John is alive. John made it through. They both made it through. He breathes deeply, tries to get that stupid heart monitor to stop screaming. "It's Detective, ma'am. And that's my partner down there. I gotta see him. Now."

He has to promise he'll stay calm for the rest of the day, he has to promise the dog won't make a revisit, he has to promise everything and a piece of his soul, but the nurse helps him into a wheelchair, clips the IV stand on the back and wheels him down to ICU. 

Fusco can't lie; it hurts like fuck to get from the bed to the chair. There's a few times when the pain overwhelms him and he almost barfs onto the pale pink blanket on his lap. It's worth it, because the trip through two elevators and twenty miles of white corridors brings him eventually to the organised clutter of the ICU. 

John is pale – paler than Fusco's ever seen him – but he's definitely alive. There's about a hundred monitors beeping and booping about how alive John is right now. Fusco almost loses it, seeing him there, more tubes going in and out of him than a bowl of spaghetti. He slides his hand carefully under John's, and the contact of skin against skin makes the dreams of the past few days seem thin and ridiculous. This is real. John is alive. 

Shaw grabs the chart at the end of the bed and flips the pages back and forth. "They're waiting for him to stabilise, then they're doing more surgery." She points to the steel rods immobilising John's left leg, which is purple and yellow with bruising. "That's a problem. Three compound fractures. He might lose it." 

Fusco's chair has him at exactly the right height to sneak a kiss onto the back of John's hand. "He's gonna pull through," he says, and he knows it's true, knows there's a future for the two of them. "This guy's not a quitter."


End file.
